On Feb. 14, 2022, a Starbucks manager pulled Michaela Sellaro aside for a meeting.
Just a few weeks earlier, Sellaro and a group of her fellow baristas at the coffee shop at 2975 East Colfax Ave. in Denver informed the company’s CEO that they planned to organize a union.
In the early afternoon, at a table by the windows, the store and district managers sat Sellaro down for a chat. The message, though light and breezy, was clear: “You know Starbucks’ stance is that we don’t need a union to represent our partners,” Kaylin Driscoll, the district manager, told Sellaro, according to a recording reviewed by The Denver Post.
Relationships with leadership will degrade if employees vote to organize, the managers told her. Promotions could be nixed. Benefits might change.
“The dynamic of having those conversations will change with a union,” said Ariel Rodriguez, the store’s manager, in the recording. “I have no personal desire to be part of a store that has to work through a union to have those conversations with you. I have zero interest in that.”
The East Colfax store, which the company has since closed, represents one of 18 Starbucks cafes in Colorado that have unionized since 2022, despite the Seattle-based coffee giant’s well-documented union-busting activity. What started with one unionized store in Buffalo, New York, in 2021 has blossomed into a nationwide movement encompassing 640 locations and thousands of workers around the United States.
Starbucks has nearly 18,300 locations, company-operated and licensed, across the U.S. and Canada. So far, despite the rapid growth in organizing, fewer than 4% of Starbucks workers are employed in unionized stores.
Starbucks has fought these efforts tooth and nail along the way. The National Labor Relations Board, which regulates private sector union activity in the U.S., has found the company illegally fired workers in response to organizing, closed stores because of union votes and engaged in widespread unfair labor practices designed to quash workers’ efforts.
The coffee conglomerate is the biggest violator of labor law in modern history, according to Starbucks Workers United, the national union representing company workers. The NLRB and its judges have found Starbucks has committed more than 500 labor law violations, the union says. Workers have filed more than 1,000 unfair labor practice charges, including more than 125 since January. More than 700 unresolved charges remain.
Despite the hundreds of union votes over the past four years, baristas are still working without a contract. This month, 92% of union workers voted to authorize an open-ended unfair labor practices strike ahead of the holiday season. The vote comes after six months of Starbucks “refusing to offer new proposals to address workers’ demands for better staffing, higher pay and a resolution of hundreds of unfair labor practice charges,” the union said in a news release.
On Nov. 13, more than 1,000 workers — from 65 stores in more than 40 cities, including Colorado Springs and Lafayette — walked off the job. The union said it was “prepared to continue escalating” its strikes if the company failed to deliver a new contract.
“Union baristas mean business and are ready to do whatever it takes to win a fair contract and end Starbucks’ unfair labor practices,” said Michelle Eisen, a Starbucks Workers United spokesperson and 15-year veteran barista. “We want Starbucks to succeed, but turning the company around and bringing customers back begins with listening to and supporting the baristas who are responsible for the Starbucks experience.
“If Starbucks keeps stonewalling, they should expect to see their business grind to a halt. The ball is in Starbucks’ court.”
The union’s push comes amid a wave of public support for organizing efforts. More than two-thirds of American adults approve of labor unions, according to Gallup polling, a level last reached in the 1950s and early 1960s. Support remains especially strong among young people — a demographic common for Starbucks baristas.
Starbucks representatives declined an interview request for this story. Sara Kelly, Starbucks’ chief partner officer, told employees in a letter this month that the company had bargained in good faith with the union, reaching more than 30 tentative agreements on full contract articles.
“Our commitment to bargaining hasn’t changed,” Kelly wrote. “Workers United walked away from the table, but if they are ready to come back, we’re ready to talk. We believe we can move quickly to a reasonable deal.”
Starbucks, she said, remains the best job in retail, paying, on average, $30 per hour for hourly workers once benefits are factored in.
The first Colorado union shop
But employees at Colorado’s first unionized cafe quickly learned the extent to which Starbucks would go to dissuade organizing efforts.
It was 2021, and Len Harris, a shift supervisor at a Starbucks location in Superior, had just seen news of baristas in Buffalo forming the company’s first union in the United States.
Harris didn’t know much about labor organizing, but she was intrigued. She and her colleagues were sick of the low compensation, of underscheduling and understaffing, and of not learning their weekly schedules until the night before.
Harris connected with the Buffalo workers over Twitter, and the resulting conversations helped launch the first Starbucks union efforts in Colorado.
Many of her colleagues were scared. One quickly told management about the plans.
Within a week, a rarely seen district manager suddenly showed up at the store, Harris said. Management organized an hour-long meeting about how the union was a bad idea, she said.
“They laid it on thick,” Harris said.
The day the workers officially filed with the NLRB, the Marshall fire broke out in Boulder County. As the blaze raged in Superior and Louisville, the Starbucks employees continued to work. Several staffers lost their own homes or were forced to evacuate.
Harris said she got a call that night from her manager, asking if she was OK. Then she said she was told to be at work first thing the next morning.
“It was a total exploitation of us,” Harris said.
As the vote neared, Starbucks amped up its anti-union activity, she said. Management initiated more two-on-one meetings with staff members. For many of the teenage baristas, this represented one of their first jobs. And here leadership was telling them that they wouldn’t be able to transfer stores or enjoy the perks that nonunion employees would receive, such as credit card tips.
“The individual intimidation was infuriating beyond belief,” Harris said. “I was sick to my stomach that they were taking advantage of these younger workers to terrify them.”
An executive flew in from Seattle and observed staff at work for weeks, Harris said. Management started cutting workers’ hours.
In April 2022, 12 of the 14 employees at the Superior location voted in favor of forming the union. The company, though, refused to negotiate with the newly formed body. So they went on strike in November, shutting down the store for the entire day.
The following day, Starbucks fired Harris, citing a policy about handling cash that she said she had never heard of. An administrative law judge with the NLRB later found the company had illegally fired Harris based on her union activity. She’s still waiting for tens of thousands of dollars in court-ordered back pay.
“I feel like I’ve gotten a peek behind the curtain to the levels of depravity that the company will sink to to take advantage of their employees,” she said.
The Starbucks playbook
The tactics Starbucks used to try to quash worker organizing in Superior are part of the playbook deployed by company leadership across Colorado and the rest of the country, according to interviews, NLRB documents and news reports.
Emily Alice Dinaro started organizing a Starbucks location on Denver’s 16th Street mall in 2022 because of what she saw as management’s failure to protect staff from violence, drug use and volatile customer interactions that were occurring daily.
After the union activity began, management started enforcing existing rules more strictly, while introducing new edicts, she said. Union supporters were singled out, and these new enforcement steps were used to push people out of the store, Dinaro said.
Out of the 26-person staff, 18 workers signed union cards, while 10 of them signed a letter to the Starbucks CEO informing him of their support. But the implementation of these new rules — concerning dress code, cell phone use and cash handling, among other things — forced widespread turnover at the store, Dinaro said. Only five people ended up voting in the union election, which passed successfully.
Dinaro was fired shortly after the vote over what the company said were repeated violations of its attendance and punctuality policy. In 2024, an NLRB judge ruled that Starbucks had fired her illegally due to her union activity.
“When I first started at Starbucks, I thought they were an outstanding, virtuous company,” Dinaro said. “I’ve come to learn they just have an outstanding PR team.”
A Starbucks spokesperson, in a statement to The Post this month, said the company “respects our partners’ right to choose through a fair and democratic process, to be represented by a union or not to be represented by a union.”
But federal judges have repeatedly said otherwise. The NLRB, time and again, has found that Starbucks violated the National Labor Relations Act in dealings with employees and their efforts to unionize.
The coffee giant shuttered a store in Colorado Springs in 2022 shortly after its workers voted to unionize and one day before a requested bargaining date. The NLRB, the following year, ordered Starbucks to reopen that store, along with 22 others around the country, because the company had failed to give notice to labor groups.
The NLRB invalidated another union election at a different Colorado Springs location in 2022, finding that management threatened employees through “highly coercive” questioning and “textbook unlawful interrogation.” One manager gave “dire” warnings to workers that unionized stores would not receive certain benefits, such as pay raises.
In several instances, Starbucks violated federal law by firing Colorado workers over pro-union activities, the NLRB found.
The company has employed these same tactics to dissuade union activity across the country.
One judge wrote that the violations at stores in New York State were “egregious and widespread,” and that Starbucks displayed “a rich history of anti-union animus” during the campaign. Another judge wrote that it was only rational for employees to “assume that they are risking their livelihood by organizing,” given Starbucks’ actions.
Federal labor regulators in 2022 asked a court to force Starbucks to stop the company’s “virulent, widespread and well-orchestrated response to employees’ protected organizing efforts.”
Starbucks has refused to divulge how much it has spent on its response to worker organizing campaigns. A federal judge in 2023 ordered the company to comply with a U.S. Department of Labor subpoena seeking expenditure documents for its investigation into the company’s compliance with the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act.
“We will not sit idly by when any company, including Starbucks Corp., defies our request to provide documents to make certain they are complying with the law,” Solicitor of Labor Seema Nanda said in a statement at the time.
Howard Schultz, the coffee chain’s billionaire founder, has said the unionization drive felt like an attack on his life’s work. In previous speeches to his employees, he has cast the union as “a group trying to take our people,” an “outside force that’s trying desperately to disrupt our company” and “an adversary that’s threatening the very essence of what (we) believe to be true.”
Sharon Block, a former NLRB member under President Obama and a professor at Harvard Law School, said the coffee giant has used a tried-and-true playbook to stifle union activity. But with weak federal laws and a National Labor Relations Board that has been stunted by the Trump administration, she said, there is little incentive for unscrupulous companies to play by the rules.
“This is a continuing pattern of behavior that sends a signal to the workers that this is a company that will do almost anything to stop them,” she said in an interview.
Starbucks has earned the distinction as a model for unlawful corporate union busting, the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, wrote in a January article. The National Labor Relations Act lacks teeth, making companies more than willing to accept a few slaps on the wrist in order to achieve their broader goals, the report’s author noted.
“There is no mystery as to why corporations like … Starbucks … violate the (law) with such regularity: Crime pays great dividends, as it produces the desired chilling effect on worker organizing and as corporations consider the law’s paltry sanctions an insignificant price to pay to prevent unionization through fear and disruption,” the article states. “The penalties for violating the (law) are utterly meaningless for multibillion-dollar corporations.”
‘No contract, no coffee’
Despite these aggressive union-busting efforts, Starbucks workers continue to organize in Colorado and across the country.
Unionized shops in Colorado have grown to 17 stores, including five in Denver. More than 640 member stores have joined the cause since 2022, making the drive one of the fastest organizing efforts in modern history, according to Starbucks Workers United.
Now workers want a contract.
The union and the company conducted their first bargaining session in April 2024, meeting monthly that summer. In December, however, the union says Starbucks backtracked on the agreed-upon path forward. Starbucks Workers United accused the company of failing to bargain in good faith.
In April, the company rejected Starbucks’ package. The two sides have yet to return to the bargaining table.
Workers voted overwhelmingly on Nov. 5 to authorize an open-ended unfair labor practice strike. The union on Nov. 13 turned Starbucks’ Red Cup Day — an annual free cup giveaway around the holiday season — into a “red cup rebellion,” forcing the closure of nearly all 65 stores where workers were striking.
Starbucks Workers United said they planned to continue escalating the strike, warning that it could be the “largest, longest strike in company history” if the company refuses to deliver a fair contract.
Colorado Sens. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet, along with 24 of their Senate colleagues, wrote a letter this month to Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol, pushing the company to end its “illegal union-busting efforts and negotiate a fair contract with its employees.”
“It is clear that Starbucks has the money to reach a fair agreement with its workers,” the senators wrote. “Starbucks must reverse course from its current posture, resolve its existing labor disputes, and bargain a fair contract in good faith with these employees.”
Kelly, Starbucks’ chief partner officer, said the company already offers the best overall wage and benefits package in retail. She touted strong benefits that include health care, 100% tuition coverage for a four-year college degree and up to 18 weeks of paid family leave. The union, she wrote, is proposing pay increases of 65% immediately and 77% over three years, along with other proposals that would “significantly affect store operations and customer experience.”
“These aren’t serious, evidence-based proposals,” Kelly wrote.
The union, though, says many workers don’t get enough hours to qualify for benefits. Starting wages for baristas, they say, are $15.25 an hour in a majority of states, though Denver’s minimum wage stands at $18.81, requiring higher rates. Barista positions listed on the company’s website start at $17 per hour in Colorado, while shift supervisor roles begin around $21 per hour.
Despite the strikes, Niccol said the holiday launch marked the company’s biggest sales day ever in North America.
Baristas in Fort Collins and Colorado Springs last month participated in a national wave of pickets as they demanded a fair contract and prepared to strike.
“No contract, no coffee!” workers and their allies shouted as they rallied outside a Starbucks cafe on South College Avenue in Fort Collins. “Respect our rights or expect our strikes!”
Drivers honked their horns in support, while supporters gave thumbs-down reactions to those frequenting the coffee chain.
Three days later, a dozen people picketed outside a cafe on Carmela Grove in Colorado Springs, chanting in call-and-response choruses.
“I’m proud so many other stores are willing to step up with us,” said Blue Taylor, a shift supervisor and strike captain at the store. The 19-year-old watched as the company, during the store’s unionizing drive, spread misinformation about the consequences of organizing and tried to dissuade workers from supporting the cause. It didn’t work.
“Baristas are fed up,” he said.
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